5 steps to a solid business case

Feb 21

Getting internal buy-in on your social media project is a critical step in ensuring it gets off the ground.  We'd suggest preparing a business case to help communicate the value and expected return on your social media campaign.

In preparing your business case, it's important that as well as communicating the expected benefits you also address head-on any compliance concerns your MLR team may have and demonstrate how you plan to mitigate any risks.  

Here we've provided a short summary of the "5 steps to a solid business case" download available in our Social Media Strategy & Planning comprehensive course. As an added bonus, you'll also find a link to download the full guide at the end of the page.  

#1 Beef up your social business case with data

The most successful social media initiatives are built on a strong data foundation. To help beef up your business case with data, you can:

  • Use social media listening and analytics tools to help you establish a contextual starting point for your business case. Volume data will give you a view on the level and scale of audience interest while sentiment data can help to shed light on how audiences perceive your company, therapy areas and medications.
  • Use consumer insight tools, advertising audience sizes and surveys to understand how your audience are using social media and which channels they are present on.
  • Analyse and benchmark the data: Compare your brand’s share of voice and sentiment to that of your competitors.  Over time you could also seek to understand if there is correlation between social share of voice and commercial metrics like prescription volume.
#2 Align your program with a key business objective
Demonstrating how the results of your campaign will help the business to deliver on key company, portfolio or therapy area objectives will support rapid buy-in from key stakeholders and drive visibility of your program more broadly within the organisation when it is successful.
#3 Prove your campaign goes further than social
When communicating to the business, tell the story of the project’s broad impact on your overall marketing and comms ecosystem, not just the social channel.

You can do this by showing how you will be using social to reinforce core activity. For example, educational content a doctor sees on LinkedIn could make them more receptive to hearing from a sales rep about the topic later. Or you could extend the reach of congress activity by complementing your in-person activity with pre and post event activity on social media.
#4 Engage key stakeholders and sponsors
It’s important to get stakeholder buy-in as early as possible. If you haven’t done so already, identify and on-board additional project sponsors. This could be aligning with a member of the extended leadership team who can provide additional insight on how it aligns with organisational goals and can approve budgets for new activities, or other leads working in the same therapy area as you who may share similar goals / audiences and so can help promote the activity internally.

In parallel with this, consult and align with medical and regulatory colleagues at the start of planning the social initiative.  It’s worth showcasing all the compliance steps you plan to have in place to monitor for AEs, including your proposed workflow and escalation process. It can help to align early on any key timelines for the project, so everyone is bought in and consulted on the review schedule.
#5 Consider a pilot approach
Whether the main barrier is marketing ROI effectiveness or compliance, one way of overcoming this is to develop a scaled back version of your suggested program, such as executing in one market rather than all markets or testing one or two of the tactics over a short period. You can show how you will plan to gather learnings and iterate your plan over time.
Frankly Pharma Tip
Throughout your business case, be sure to include some key case studies closely aligned with your program. Showing how other pharma companies are using social media and some of the results they are achieving will also help demonstrate it’s possible to use social media in an effective and compliant way and will prompt good debate and discussion with different stakeholders.

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